Direct Marketing Services For Law Firms
I am a leading lawyer marketer who has dominated my legal field of practice in my state for 25 years. Married with 3 kids, my financial success has allowed me to consider retiring from the practice of law in the near future. I am not yet another lawyer salesman who could not succeed in private practice who sells advertising for a marketing company or advertising agency.
I am an independent sole practitioner who knows the cost of not investing in direct mail and who single handedly beats national seo companies within my entire state territory in claiming top ranked Google real estate.
Whether it be through my direct mail success or ability to maximize my knowledge of internet optimization to my law firm’s advantage, my legal practice is the envy of law firm marketers. For years competitors have tried and failed to understand my direct mail strategies or to outrank my online search results. However, in the interests of what to me has become the most basic of needed insight, I will throw all lawyers a bone as to how not to market a small law firm or individual practice.
I do not customarily share information with the public as to direct marketing strategies conveyed only to clients. However, there is a proliferation of destructive online marketing advice that must be addressed related to law firm direct marketing services and related terms.
A Lawyer Marketing Plan Must Not Be Built Upon Free Advice
For the sake of this discussion, I will center my thoughts on the hazards that can come to the law firm advertising campaign that becomes overly reliant upon free online resources to help guide its efforts. The easy accessibility of online information clothed under the category of expert marketing has become a significant impediment to many attorney’s ability to move forward with the proper time and investment to develop a truly winning large or small law firm marketing campaign for years to come.
Lawyers, not unlike many among the general public have become addicted to online resources. The millennial generation half in jest has concluded that if something is espoused on the internet, a sizable number of their generation will be inclined to believe it. Unfortunately, this naivety in believing that there is little cost in adhering to the free marketing advice of others online can become irreparably costly to an individual practitioner or small law firm advertising campaign.
It is the predictably worthless free marketing advice that is initially offered that has time and again served as a dangerous bait with which to lure unsuspecting lawyers to their ultimate financial demise.
Valuable time, money and effort is too often wasted in following flawed “cost free” lawyer marketing advice of incompetent advertising or marketing outfits ill equipped to properly direct a successful marketing campaign for the small law firm or individual lawyer.
The internet contains a wealth of cost free resources that enable members of the public at large to gain crucial insights in regard to any facet of life.
Once engaged in a lifestyle of free online informational pursuits with which to gain needed knowledge within any field of endeavor, it is often hard to assess when the true need arises to consult and pay a professional for information that can be found at no cost online.
Consequently, the issue in many circumstances is not whether I can locate free informational resources online with which to assist me, but rather, whether the free information being provided has any relative value. Further, whether reliance upon these free materials and/or advice can actually be detrimental where the information given is either incorrect, out of date or just plain bad.
More to the point, whether such free expertise on money making marketing success for lawyers is provided by individuals without money making marketing success of their own.
While free resources may initially sound all well and good, prioritization of business activities premised upon cost free advice found online can lead to untold waste of time and resources; inefficiency that all too often can lead to the dissolution of an otherwise capable law practice or business pursuit.
The perilous lessons of naive reliance upon free informational resources found online is one that I personally know all too well. I know because my initial direct mail strategy years ago was premised upon implementing all of the free online marketing wisdom I could accumulate on the subject of direct mail.
I smugly and confidently thought how smart I would be in simply digesting all of the direct mail marketing materials and correspondences offered to attorneys for free online. My hard work would be rewarded with an accumulation of resources and materials that in theory would enable me to create a dui lawyer direct mail campaign second to none.
Why don’t all attorneys accumulate powerful marketing knowledge this way I thought to myself? In time I learned that any attorneys foolishly thinking that they would outsmart those lawyers truly making money by direct mail would be proven sadly mistaken.
The so called top ranked legal marketing advice offered at no cost online is not only almost always of little value, but is actually counterproductive and potentially destructive to marketing success. I have too often learned that free online advice equates to worthless online advice.
Reliance upon the flawed suggestions offered by non lawyers online who have no clue as to how to retain legal clients will ultimately result in the well deserved failure of a law practice. Financial success rests not within the words of those peddling valueless legal marketing advice online at no cost, but by unlocking the guarded secrets as to how wealth generating law firms obtain the lion share of targeted legal clients within a community.
Want The Best Direct Mail Campaign For Your Law Practice? Don’t Do These Things.
Free online marketing advice on direct mail is usually both wrong and harmful to your ability to succeed as a quality lawyer. Sending “lumpy” envelopes, generic envelopes without a return address, express envelopes tricking consumers into believing they have received an official government document that must be opened, pens, calendars or other other legal “favors” to create a mishapen package or envelope; all bad, all wrong.
Any individual who will respond to a lawyer marketing campaign because you offered him or her a free pen or tricked them into opening your “lumpy” envelope will almost always be the type of client that you do not want to waste your valuable time with.
Without political correctness to confuse the issue, individuals responding to such advice will inevitably be clients of a public defender, a lawyer who will be paid nothing by those appreciative of the free pens or calendars you have provided to them.
If you want to be perceived as a desperate lawyer who thinks the type of client you want will respond to deception to open your materials or is impressed with your ability to protect their freedom because of your offering of a pen, you have been sadly mislead and perhaps have no business within independent practice.
Although comical, top ranked online websites on lawyer direct mail marketing actually continue to spout this nonsense. Apparently, enough lawyers persist in following such advice when they have nowhere else to turn. I am not in position to mock such desperation as although I did not fall for the “lumpy” envelope strategies or send deceptive direct mail packages disguised as from the US Government, I fell for less insidious online marketing advice.
Usually my initial downfall came from the proverbial expert marketing or advertising agencies who I would later learn had no real world understanding of how to appeal to an individual who has just been arrested. Time after time any costly glossy overproduced items that may win advertising awards for creativity failed in the prime objective of making me appear as the trusted legal authority in my community.
The consistent bi product of such marketing “expertise;” years of wasted time and thousands of dollars inefficiently misdirected from my practice’s bottom line to the pockets of internet marketers and advertising agencies.
Whether marketing a law practice for the first time or a law firm advertising without success, use common sense in the trusted counsel entrusted to assist your marketing efforts. As lawyers, we know that legal success comes from putting forth the best evidence within a court of law. Within the court of public opinion failing to review the evidence and proven success of your relied upon marketing expert will quite justifiably cause you to lose the verdict of the general public as to the credibility of you or your law firm.
Don’t allow a marketing company to state their case to win your trust, make them prove their case through actual realized success evidenced by online results and demonstrated financial success.
You would never put a flawed expert on the stand on behalf of a client. Don’t allow a non proven lawyer advertising company or unsuccessful former lawyer salesman speak for you or your law firm in the eyes of the general public.